“Hoboken,” Jack said to Oscar, enough to clue him in to the circumstances without divulging information to the porter or his wife.
Jack said, “Why didn’t you tell these good people that you speak English?”
“It would not have mattered,” she said, looking at the adults. “They won’t listen to me no matter what language I speak. And I knew if I told them what they want to know”—she frowned at Pettigrew—“they would send us back to—”
She took note of the way Pettigrew leaned toward her, and paused. In Italian she said, “Il orfanotrofio. It took us so long to get this far and Lia is very tired.”
“You ran away.” Oscar spoke his Neopolitan Italian, very similar to the language the girls spoke.
Rosa glanced at him nervously, taken aback by the combination of an Irish face and the language of her home. Finally, she nodded.
With patient questioning Oscar was able to pinpoint where the girls had started, and when. They had left the orphan asylum at Prince and Mott before light and started north, asking directions from an Italian street musician with a monkey who wore a hat.
“But how did you ask for directions? Where is it you’re trying to go?”
“Here,” Rosa said, spreading out her arms. “Sister Mary Augustin described this place exactly.”
Sister Mary Augustin from St. Patrick’s; the face came back to him quickly. But he was missing something, so he thought for a moment and phrased his question carefully.
“Sister Mary Augustin told you how to get to here, to this place?”
“No,” Rosa said, irritation starting to rise again. “On the journey from the ferry—” She stopped herself. “On the way to that place, the omnibus went past this church that isn’t a church after all. Sister Mary Augustin pointed to it and told us that Dr. Savard lived just nearby. She told us about the house that has a garden bigger than its own self behind a brick wall, and fruit trees, and a pergola, and hens and a rooster.”
“Un gallo!” her sister echoed, as if a rooster could only exist in Italian.
“I was sure I could find it because Dr. Savard has to help us. They took our brothers away, and I have to find them. I was so sure I could find a house with angels over the door,” she finished.
To Lia Oscar said, “Angeli sopra la porta?”
“Si. Putti e gigli.” It struck Jack that the little girl was trying very hard to be exact.
He turned to Pettigrew. “Is there a house nearby with lilies and angels carved above the door—”
“More likely cherubs or cupids—” Oscar suggested.
“Coo-pids,” Lia mimicked.
“—carved into the stone lintel. Does that sound familiar?”
“It’s Mrs. Quinlan they want,” the patrol officer said. “If they had said about the angels and lilies before, we would have solved this right away. The Quinlan place is half a block away.”
At that Rosa’s composure finally cracked and tears began to leak down her face. There was something very formal about her even in her despair, but the little one was less bound by pride. Lia might not have understood the exchange, but her sister’s tears were more than she could bear.
When Oscar held out his arms, Lia collapsed toward him, pushed her face into the wool of his coat, and sobbed openly.
“She could have told us she was looking for the Quinlan place,” Pettigrew said to Jack, gruff embarrassment in his tone. “Everybody knows the house with the walled garden. All they had to do was speak English.”
? ? ?
COUSIN MARGARET WAS reading aloud to them from the paper, something she liked to do because, Sophie understood, it was the only way to introduce the subjects she wanted to discuss. Margaret, raised in this house by Uncle Quinlan and his first wife, had only a few interests: her sons, the way she was perceived by the other old Knickerbocker families, keeping the memory of her husband alive, and crime.
She read many papers every day and kept a ledger detailing all the crimes that happened within a square mile of home. Now she sat in an elegant but understated day dress, her posture perfect, her head held erect, and read to them about a burglary on Greene Street, just two blocks away, in that neighborhood she referred to as French Town. If she went on any longer in that tone there would be an argument; Aunt Quinlan could tolerate only so much of Margaret’s fearmongering and even less of her distaste for immigrants. Eventually she would be compelled to remind her stepdaughter that her father’s grandparents had been immigrants. It was an old and exhausting argument, and Sophie was thinking of ways to deflect it when she saw two men coming up the street, the older of the two carrying a very little girl in a ragged coat far too big for her. A second girl of eight or nine years was looking up at the houses as they passed, pointing to gates and lampposts and doorways and explaining something. The girls looked as though they had been living on the street and had had a hard time of it.